I only drank on weekends and quit 10 years ago – yet I STILL live with humiliating health effects no one talks about

I wasn’t the person sneaking vodka into my morning coffee. I wasn’t hiding bottles in cupboards or drinking every day just to function.

I was the fun one – the party girl. The kind of drinker who started on Thursday night and went hard until Sunday, then pulled it together for work on Monday.

Here in Australia, we celebrate that person – the drunkest in the room, the one who doesn’t know when to stop. That was me. People laughed with me about it; I laughed too.

It felt like freedom. It felt normal.

But this is what no one told me: you don’t have to be a ‘full-blown alcoholic’ to do lasting damage. Fifteen years of social binge drinking wrecked my brain.

Ten years after I quit, I’m still forgetting whole conversations, blacking out memories that never come back, and trying to patch together a life that alcohol stole from me.

We think it’s all fun and games, until it isn’t.

The price is steep.

I had always been a happy little girl, but somehow felt slightly out of step.

By the age of seven I’d developed my first addiction: sugar. I would sneak $2 from my mother’s wallet and buy sweets to soothe feelings I didn’t know how to name. That pattern of numbing myself set the tone.

By high school, I had gained 20kg (44lbs or 3st), then swung back the other way and became frighteningly thin. I wrestled with my body, never feeling comfortable in my own skin.

At 17, I entered a toxic relationship. And at 18, I started drinking.

From the beginning, I went too far. When I lived in Munich and worked in a bar, I ended up in hospital after one night’s drinking.

Deep down, I knew alcohol was dangerous, but I pushed the thought away. Party culture in Australia made it easy to dismiss.

My pattern wasn’t drinking every day. I could go Monday to Wednesday without touching a drop. But once I started, I couldn’t stop.

Every Thursday, the conversations would begin: Where are we going? What are we doing? By Friday, I was in full flight. I drank to fit in. I drank to belong. From Thursday to Sunday, I would drink and drink and drink.

I thought it was hilarious. I thought being ‘the drunkest one’ made me bold and likeable.

What I didn’t know was that drinking until I couldn’t remember anything was my brain shutting down. I didn’t know that every time I laughed about forgetting the night before, I was losing pieces of myself that I’d never get back.

When I fell pregnant with my son Axel, I stopped.

I stayed sober throughout pregnancy and breastfeeding. For the first time in years, my body was free of alcohol. And I noticed how good that felt.

But old habits die hard. When Axel was 18 months old, I went out for dinner with friends. Lychee martinis. Espresso martinis. I fell straight back into my old pattern and kept drinking.

That night ended with me violently ill, throwing up outside my Uber. The sickness in the days that followed was brutal.

That was my line in the sand. I decided I was done. 

I quit cold turkey. The hardest part wasn’t the cravings, it was the loneliness. My identity had been built on being the party girl – once I stopped, I wasn’t invited out. Friends didn’t know what to do with me anymore.

I didn’t know what to do with myself either.

So I made plans for the day after a night out to keep me motivated. I drove to events so that I couldn’t drink. I still went to nightclubs and danced – only this time, sober. Slowly, I built a new version of myself.

Writing helped me process the pain of that transition.

And for a while, sobriety felt incredible. I’d never known such clarity. I thought the hardest part was over.

But as the years went on, I noticed something that shook me: I wasn’t just forgetful, I was losing whole chunks of my life.

I would promise to return a friend’s plate, then days later completely forget about it. I would listen blankly as people recounted nights we’d shared together. Zero recollection. Not hazy, not fuzzy… just gone.

One of my best friends often brings up key moments in our friendship – moments that we lived through together. She’ll laugh and reminisce, then ask me, ‘You remember that, right?’ And I’ll have to say no.

My son had a major accident recently, and she reminded me of a time years earlier when her son had gone through the same thing.

She insisted that I was there, that we had talked about it, that I had comforted her. I couldn’t pull a single shred of that memory back. It’s like it never existed in my mind.

People think I’m rude, or careless, or simply don’t care. The truth is, the memories are gone.

Even after ten years of sobriety, I live with cognitive damage every day.

I need alarms for everything – meetings, school reminders, appointments. If it isn’t written down and backed up by reminders, I’ll forget it.

In a professional setting, it can be humiliating. I’ve missed meetings. I’ve blanked on commitments. I over-explain, because I worry that people will think I’m being dismissive. I’ve learned to be upfront about it. ‘It’s not you,’ I tell them. ‘It’s my brain.’

Doctors tell me the same thing: alcohol damages the hippocampus and the frontal lobes. Some recovery is possible, but much of it is permanent.

I research endlessly, try every tool I can: fish oil, walnuts, blueberries, meditation, sleep. But deep down I know I’ll never get back all I’ve lost.

And it isn’t just memory.

My gut was ruined. It has taken years to heal from the inflammation that alcohol caused. When my gut is off, anxiety spikes, my mind fogs and I spiral.

Depression and anxiety have been constant companions, too.

In 2020, I went through a separation. It would have been easy to relapse. Instead, I leaned into breathwork, meditation and art therapy. I slipped back into sugar at times, but I stayed sober.

To this day, I grieve the life I might have had without alcohol. I imagine being more secure, more confident, a mother who could share memories more vividly with her son. I know that childhood insecurity set me on this path – always trying to be someone I wasn’t, always thinking I needed something outside myself to shine.

But I also know this: sobriety gave me Axel’s mum. It gave me self-love, purpose, and the courage to create Happy Souls Kids, the platform I built to help children process their emotions in ways that I never could.

I still live with memory gaps. I still lose moments. But I’m here, I’m present, and I’m proof that you don’t need to drink every day to destroy yourself. Sometimes the damage is done one ‘fun’ weekend at a time.

If you take one thing from my story, I hope it is this:

We often think the only people who pay the price are the ones drinking every day, hiding bottles, unable to function. That wasn’t me. I was just a social drinker who always went too far. And I’m the one living with brain damage, ten years after I quit.

It was all fun and games – until it wasn’t. The price of those years has been heavy. But the gift of sobriety is knowing I’ll never have to pay it again.